


Slaughterhouse-Five

by SoloMoon



Series: Eleutherophobia [13]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Alternate Universe - Tom Lives, Canon Compliant until #54, Gen, Implied/Referenced Genocide, POV Minor Character, Post-War setting, Unapologetic Military Inaccuracies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:33:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26377339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SoloMoon/pseuds/SoloMoon
Summary: Professor Jake's first day of class, from Tom's point of view.
Series: Eleutherophobia [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/151619
Comments: 70
Kudos: 274





	Slaughterhouse-Five

**Author's Note:**

> Written to the sounds of [ "Man on the Moon" by R.E.M.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOzUZDL5ngs)
> 
> Set about two weeks after "A Straight Line Down Through the Heart" (about fifteen months after the end of the war), but these stories can be read in any order or alone. All you need to know from earlier works is that Tom survived the final battle, and that the yeerk inside his head at the time was named Essa 412 but is more widely known by the title Visser Seventeen.

They filed into the room one by one. Some whispering eagerly to each other. Some solemn and silent. They didn’t look like much, certainly: they were just a hundred or so college-age kids in normal clothes. Other than the popularity of crew cuts and the uniformly excellent posture, there was really no sign that they were the newest and brightest of the U.S. military and intelligence communities. Some CIA, some USAF, some... who knew.

And yet here they were. They’d been hand-chosen on hundreds of different criteria to spend the next six weeks trying to qualify for the most elite special forces unit the U.S. had ever seen. If enough of them passed, the next class would be entirely non-American.

A couple of them glanced at me leaning against the back wall as they chose desks, but I was close to the right age and had something approaching the right haircut. Other than the casual posture I didn’t stand out that much.

“Is that…?” One of them whispered, glancing at me.

“No. Looks like him, though,” the guy’s friend whispered back.

I considered waving sarcastically at them, but I’d promised to try not to draw attention to myself.

Not everyone noticed right away when the door opened again and he walked into the room. A lot of them were still whispering among themselves, and it wasn’t like he made an announcement or started writing his name on the board.

But then the realization went through the room like a ripple. Within a matter of seconds each of them did the math about who the messy-haired kid standing next to the projector had to be. Just like that the room was dead-silent and every person there was sitting at attention.

“Hi,” Jake said.

No one answered. They were all sitting frozen.

Jake waved.

A few people awkwardly, shyly, waved back.

"Okay, then." Giving up on getting a greeting in response, Jake instead perched on the edge of the professor’s desk. “I’m sure you all know why you’re here. Would someone mind explaining to me?”

Half the hands in the room shot into the air.

“Uh, go ahead.” Jake gestured vaguely, and one of the guys in the fourth row stood up. And saluted.

Jake blinked, and for a second looked like he wasn’t sure whether he should salute back.

“We’re here to learn to defend the planet, sir,” the guy rapped out.

“Good, thanks, but no,” Jake said.

The guy winced and sat back down without saying anything else.

“Anyone else?” Jake asked.

Significantly fewer hands went up this time.

“Yeah, in the front.”

The girl who stood up didn’t look military to me—she was tiny and had long hair in a bun—but she definitely saluted like she was. “We’re here so that you can examine us and determine whether or not we’re qualified to learn to defend our species. Sir.”

Jake shrugged. “Yeah, that’s a lot closer. Although, please, don't call me ‘sir.’ I don’t actually have a rank that’s not honorary and I’m…” He ducked his head, smiling nervously. “Pretty sure I’m the youngest person in this room.”

This request was met with a lot of uneasy shuffling and a few frantic glances between classmates. People clearly weren’t sure what to do with this strange and probably uncomfortable form of apparent disrespect for his superior experience.

“Anyway,” Jake said, and everyone settled again immediately. “General Hogarth has decided to form two response teams who will be given morphing ability and access to a handful of morphs. Probably those best suited for a combination of stealth and unarmed combat. Each team will have six members, because…” He raised an eyebrow. “Their analyses indicate that teams this size tend to have the highest success rate at engaging in guerrilla attacks against alien invaders.”

I smirked at the implied sarcasm. I was the only one. Everybody else looked worried, and I could tell why: there were definitely more than twelve students in the room.

A hand went up. Jake nodded at its owner.

“What does that mean for anyone who doesn’t make either team, sir?” the woman asked.

Jake gave an uncertain gesture. “I guess you’ll get other assignments. I’m only supposed to pick twelve of you: six for the primary response team, six for the secondary one. Everyone else’s reassignments will be classified.”

“Fucking typical,” a guy in the back row whispered to the woman next to him.

“Sorry, could you repeat that?” Jake said loudly.

The guy turned dead-white. He clearly hadn’t thought anyone would overhear him. “I… Uh, sir… I mean…” He stood up, saluted. “I apologize for my disrespect, sir.”

“Okay.” Jake continued to look at him, not yet releasing him from their stare-down. “And what was your question?”

The guy swallowed, glanced around the room, and then decided to own up to it. “I should have conducted myself more decorously,” he stammered, sounding like he was reciting a line from a manual somewhere. “I only meant... I was not aware in advance that so few of us would be given the right to morph. I’m sorry, sir.”

Jake nodded. “So are you here because you want to be able to morph?”

“Yes, I am.” The guy lifted his chin. “But then, aren’t we all?”

“I hope not,” Jake said, “because while I appreciate you being honest, you also just disqualified yourself for the team. Thanks for volunteering. You can go now.”

The guy remained frozen. Everyone was avoiding looking at him. Or at Jake.

“You can either leave or stay, but staying is going to be a waste of your time,” Jake continued briskly. “Morphing isn’t a privilege. It’s not a toy. It’s a weapon. One that is risky to use, poorly understood, and nearly as likely to kill the user as your enemies. Eight percent of the andalites and fifteen percent of the humans who have ever been given access to morphing power are now trapped in morph. An unknown additional percent were killed in training exercises and circumstances where they were unable to gain control of the animal mind at all.”

“Sir,” the guy mumbled, practically inaudible. “Yes, sir.”

“But hey, you probably already know the risks.” Jake had turned away from the guy. Sliding off his desk, he walked the front of the room to look each of the recruits in the eye. “What the government’s a lot more concerned about is what people can do with that power when they actually know how to use it.”

The silence that filled the room now was absolute. Even the guy who’d been arguing a second ago was frozen, waiting for Jake to finish.

“I could kill every person in this room in about...” Jake actually considered for a second. “Five to seven minutes. I could walk into any bank on the planet and walk out with as much money as I felt like. I could probably infiltrate any government building on the planet—yeah, even the ones with Gleet BioFilters, armed guards, and literal airtight seals on every entry point.”

There were a few furtive glances between classmates again. Clearly, at least some of them did _not_ like that.

“I'm sure you guys have all been given the speech about being held to a higher order of responsibility than civilians because of your training,” Jake said.

He waited; a few people nodded.

“Good. So you get the gist of what I’m saying when I tell you this: Anyone who is caught using the morphing technology to break laws, to harm another person, or even for any kind of personal gain? Will be turned into a nothlit after conviction. By force if necessary.” Jake crossed his arms, expression grim. “Human technology is too far behind andalite technology, and the andalites aren’t exactly being helpful about letting us catch up. Which means we don’t have a jail that can contain a morph-capable criminal with any comfortable level of security. We don’t have any punishments that will mean anything to someone who can escape from anywhere, be anything, and even shrug off any injury. So if you get the morphing tech, and then you commit _any crime at all_?”

Jake looked around the room, making eye contact with them one by one. “You will be offered a choice: life as a nothlit in prison, or execution. Since the suicide rate for andalites trapped in morph is estimated to be somewhere in the range of seventy percent, it might even amount to one and the same. If you can morph and you break a law, you die. And that’s how it’s going to be for the rest of your life.

“So General Hogarth wants me to be _absolutely certain_ I can trust anyone I give morphing power to. If there are less than twelve of you in this class that I end up thinking have what it takes, then there are going to be less than twelve of you chosen. So.” Jake made eye contact with the guy who’d argued, and then gestured toward the door. “Thank you for your time.”

The poor guy was standing so stiffly by now that he looked about ready to fall over. He didn’t say anything else, just saluted again and marched out the door in lockstep.

There was silence for a few seconds after he shut the door behind him, and then the young woman who spoke earlier raised her hand again.

“Yes?” Jake said.

“Well, if you don’t mind me asking, sir—uh, I mean, professor?” She laughed self-consciously as soon as she realized what she’d said.

Jake grinned. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Well, what _does_ it take to succeed in this class?” she asked.

Jake chewed on his lip, hesitating rather than coming out with a quick or snappy answer. “Whatever it takes to be an Animorph, I guess. And I’m not even sure what that is. I mean, if you’d have seen us the night we met Elfangor…” He laughed nervously, rubbing the back of his neck. “We were a bunch of dumb kids, no special skills in anything. Cassie failed the math test she took that week. Rachel spent entire gymnastics meets falling off the balance beam. Marco lost over ten dollars on arcade games in one go, and Tobias was practically hoping for an alien invasion to break up the monotony."

There was a quiet smattering of laughter. A few people immediately stiffened like they thought they shouldn’t have laughed, but Jake visibly drew strength from their reaction.

“I only suggested we do something daring by cutting through the construction site because…” Jake laughed again, flushing. “Because I was the only eighth grader in the entire middle school who didn’t make the cut for the junior varsity basketball team. And I was kind of hoping I would get murdered on the way home so I wouldn’t have to tell my big brother that.”

I winced. I could distinctly recall him mumbling the confession toward the kitchen floor—and Temrash 114’s contemptuous response.

“Sorry that’s not a better answer. I don’t know what it takes to be an Animorph any more than you guys do.” Jake paced across the front of the room, still thinking out loud. “I guess it takes resilience, but also adaptability. Ruthlessness when necessary and compassion all the times in between. Listening to one’s commander is a good idea, being able to call one’s commander on bad ideas even more so.” He wheeled back around to face the room. “So if any of you can demonstrate all of that, _and_ all the qualities that the authorities think they need in order to be able to trust you, then a couple of you might actually make the cut.”

The young woman who had asked nodded her head. “Thank you, professor.”

No one giggled this time.

“Great.” Jake ran a hand through his hair, looking self-conscious and a little uncertain now. “Uh, where was I before we started bickering about what to use morphing for?”

“You were asking us why we were here,” a guy in the front row volunteered.

“Yeah, thanks.” Jake was losing momentum.

I was seriously considering pulling out a distraction—I knew that he’d never done this kind of sustained lecture before—when he suddenly smiled again.

“Okay, to answer the question of why you’re all wasting a perfectly good Monday morning listening to me blather, I think we need to answer a different question: why did the yeerks target humans?”

The eager guy in the front row shot his hand into the air so quickly I was worried he was going to strain something.

Jake nodded to him.

“We’re an ideal species for infestation, especially in the form of covert conquest,” he said.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Jake said. “Anyone know _why_ humans are one of the best species the yeerks ever happened upon, as far as infestation goes?”

Several hands went up.

Jake opened his arms to the room as a whole. “Just call things out, I’m not your mom.”

“Humans have opposable thumbs?” a guy to the far left of the room suggested.

“We’re sentient,” the guy who’d mistaken me for Jake added.

“Color vision.”

“Our weapons technology.”

“We’re susceptible to suggestion.”

"Those radio signals we transmitted back in the thirties?"

“The andalites didn’t know about us.”

“Willingness to become voluntary controllers?”

“We’re omnivores.”

“We’re bipeds who can climb.”

"Space travel?"

“Evolutionary similarity to hork-bajir!”

Jake held up both hands. “Okay, okay. So you’re all partially right—the opposable thumbs help with having human-controllers work andalite-designed weapons like dracon beams, the extra senses are a nice bonus, and the omnivore diet was kind of a happy accident—but you’re thinking about this the wrong way. Just... talk it over with each other, won’t you?”

This got them whispering to each other, but no further hands went up. The two recruits sitting closest to me were having an intense debate about terrain characteristics in human-built cities, and definitely missing the point.

“Anyone got anything else?” Jake said.

There was more whispering, but no one volunteered. Too scared of wrong answers, most likely.

Gradually the whispering petered off. No one offered any other answers.

Smirking lazily, I lifted my right hand and held it over my head.

He had seen me, I knew he had, but he was determinedly not looking at me. “Anyone? Throw something out there.”

I waved my hand slightly. This earned me a glare from Jake.

Still, no one else answered.

Jake sighed. “Fine, go ahead.”

Everyone in the classroom turned to see who he was talking to.

“You’re all thinking like humans,” I said. “You need to think like yeerks.”

Most of them were still staring at me like they couldn’t figure out how some clueless civilian managed to wander into their private meeting.

And then I heard one of them whisper my name.

“He’s right,” Jake said.

Everyone quickly snapped back around to look at him, but a couple of them kept shooting sideways glances at me. I heard a few more whispers: “Yeah, his brother, the one who…” “...Visser Seventeen.” “Oh my god, didn’t he try to kill…?” “The controller...”

“Everything you just mentioned is what sets humans apart from other Earth species,” Jake continued, and the students shut up. “Not what sets us apart from other species in the galaxy. Hate to kill everyone’s ego, but we’re not the only sentient ones, or the only ones with space travel, or anywhere close to being the most technologically advanced species out there. So what makes us special _to the yeerks_?”

If they’d had textbooks in front of them this was the part where they’d all be frantically flipping pages trying to look like they’d done last night’s reading. As it was, they were mostly just looking at their hands or whispering to people sitting nearby.

“It’s something sensory, right?” The woman sitting directly in front of me turned around to whisper to me, even though I didn't really count as being her classmate. “It has to be something sensory.”

I slowly shook my head.

She squinted at me, clearly trying to read the answer off my face. Lost cause, on a zombie.

Rather than answer her, I raised my hand again.

Jake twitched. Just for a second I thought he was going to give in to the temptation to flip me off. But he clearly remembered where he was enough to settle for glaring some more.

Most of them could follow the direction of his stare. By now, half the class was glancing back at me to see if I would come out with another answer.

“Okay, fine.” Jake gave in. "Tom?"

“We’re a Class Five species,” I said. “That’s what drew the yeerks here in the first place, and it’s what kept them throwing troops at the planet even after they found out there were ‘andalite bandits’ running around smashing Kandrona emitters and trying to stage host breakouts.”

“Class Five?” the woman who’d whispered to me before said.

“Five out of five,” Jake confirmed. “According to the yeerks’ alien categorization system, ranking species based on ease of infiltration and infestation.”

“That’s barbaric,” one guy muttered.

At least they were talking more now. Probably because they’d noticed how much Jake approved of their talking. 

“Humans fall into Class Five for four reasons.” Jake held up one finger. “We’ve got centrally located brains that can be accessed from the outside.” He tapped his own earlobe, then held up a second finger. “We can move around yeerk spaceships and operate conventional weaponry easily.” Another finger. “There are over five billion of us, and our population is growing.” Another finger. “We lack the capability to fight off an invasion.”

Most of the room was frantically taking notes as he spoke.

“Three of those four qualifications are not factors we can control.” Jake paused until everyone was done writing and looked back up at him. “We’re unlikely to evolve so we don't need brains anymore at any point in the near future, we can’t change the fact that our average size is comparable to that of gedds, and…” His mouth twisted into something that might have been a smile, if it was a little less bitter. “I think we’d all rather that no one try to reduce the size of the human population the way that the andalites did with the hork-bajir.”

This time there was dead silence. People were glancing at each other and then back at Jake as if trying to make sure he wasn’t about to break out a smile and tell them he was only joking. What had happened on the hork-bajir home world wasn’t common knowledge.

I guess Jake wasn’t kidding about needing to trust whoever he chose. And if telling them was a test, it was a pretty damn powerful one.

“That leaves us with only one option: becoming capable enough to fend off an invasion,” Jake said.

“Sir…” One student raised his hand halfway.

“Yes?”

The guy hesitated before phrasing the question. “Does this mean that the government expects another invasion?”

This time Jake did make eye contact with me before he answered. “Yes. Yes they do.”

My stomach clenched. Yeah, _that_ thought was going to keep me awake tonight.

“Humans are at a uniquely risky—uniquely valuable—place in their evolutionary history as a species.” Jake was back to pacing; the motion looked brusque and purposeful, as if he was heading quickly toward a destination that just happened to involve a lot of walking around in circles. “We are technologically advanced enough to send out radio signals and even unmanned craft into deep space, but not so technologically advanced that we pose a threat to a species as advanced as the yeerks or the andalites.

“If the first yeerk patrol ships had originally come across our planet a hundred years ago, they might have flown just outside our atmosphere and never once realized there was intelligent life here at all. If they had come a hundred years later…” He paused long enough to give the whole class a quick, assessing look. “Well. We can certainly hope that the humans would have seen them coming from light-years away and had the technology necessary to blast them out of the sky before they ever got within our solar system.

“We’ve advanced far enough to produce huge population growth thanks to our diet and technology, but not far enough to have contained the massive outpouring of life or to expand to other planets. At this moment in time, we’re ripe for the slaughter. And others will come. Now that the yeerks and andalites know about us, know that we have bodies to spare and no way to fend off invaders, others will try to take advantage.”

“Um, professor?”

Again, Jake smiled in spite of himself at the title. “Yes?”

She put her hand down and stood up. “With all respect, professor... You said that we’re not capable of fending off an invasion. As a species.”

When she didn’t continue, Jake nodded. “Yeah, that’s right.”

The young woman shifted in place. “I only meant, sir...” She shrugged. “Doesn’t recent history show that that’s not the case?”

Jake favored her with another of those ancient, bitter smiles. “You mean because humanity can rely on the Animorphs to do something about any future invaders?”

“Don’t go all sarcastic just because she doesn’t get it,” I muttered under my breath, even though I knew he couldn't hear.

“Or the andalites,” the young woman said.

Okay, that one almost made me want to say something sarcastic in response myself.

Jake nodded slowly. “Do you know why we won the war against the yeerks?”

He seemed a little surprised when over thirty hands went up. I’m pretty sure the question was meant to be rhetorical.

“Just somebody yell out an answer,” he said. “I don’t care.”

“Strategic use of limited resources to inflict maximum damage against a better-equipped opponent?”

“Superior planning and deployment of forces?”

“Divergent thinking strategies derived from the relative youth of the guerilla forces?”

“The shock and terror employed with strategically visible attacks on key targets?”

“Innovative exploitation of known weaknesses in the enemy’s leadership structure?”

“The intelligence advantage that came from superior reconnaissance and espionage techniques?”

“Defensive familiarity with terrain and environment, which informed timing and location of countermeasures?”

“Courage and pluck?”

This set half the room off giggling and the other half glaring at the guy who’d blurted out that last one. But the class seemed to be relaxing away from their formality ever more, and Jake was clearly happier the more informal they became. They were warming to each other.

“I think all those things had something to do with it.” Jake smiled approval at everyone who’d spoken. “I mean, I don’t know how plucky we all were by the end there…”

There was another chorus of laughter, and now the guy who’d given that answer looked smug.

“But right up until about a month before the end of the war, we were losing more than we were winning. By a significant margin. I know that we managed to annoy the yeerks on a handful of different fronts, but I can’t claim we did anything more than that.”

“Bullshit,” I murmured.

The woman sitting directly in front of me twisted around to give me a scathing look.

“Do any of you know what changed about three months before the end of the war?” Jake asked.

He was looking at me again, and I knew that this time it wasn’t because he’d heard me. He was remembering the fight in the hospital garage. Essa 412 running through the forest, morphing cube clenched in my left hand, knuckles still bloodied from where my fist had impacted Jake’s face. Pursued by a bloody, limping, but relentless tiger. Turning. Feeling my finger press on the trigger of the dracon beam, helpless to stop it. Watching Jake go down—and get back up. Undeterred, even while bleeding out.

I slowly spread out the fingers of my right hand, lacing them through the fingers of my left and clasping my hands there in front of me. Breathing in bracing oxygen.

Finally the kid in the front row just said it. “The yeerks got morphing tech.”

By using me as a human shield. Because at the time everyone from Essa 412 to Visser Three thought that there was no way in hell Jake would ever bring himself to kill me.

“Yeah, good,” Jake said. “So what changed?”

“A bunch of controllers could morph then?” someone said.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” I muttered under my breath.

“Yeah, so?” Jake said.

There was more whispering. Plenty of glances swapped back and forth across the room.

“The technological advantages shifted.” It was the guy in the front row again. “That leveled the playing field.”

The playing field had never been level, and in that moment the Animorphs had gone from being grossly outmatched to being ridiculously so.

“Yeah, so?” Jake said again.

“So… That changed the way that both sides were fighting the war.”

“Yeah, so?”

Jake was just lucky these people all thought the sun shone out his ass. Any normal class would’ve been groaning loudly and throwing spitballs by now. Instead, they were visibly wracking their brains for him.

It was a guy two rows in front of me who finally spoke up. “So the yeerks had a new weapon, and it forced the Animorphs to bring the war into the open, and recruit new allies. The fight escalated until eventually humanity struck the final blow. Defeated Visser One.”

Bingo. He’d said the magic words.

Jake held up a single finger. “Just to clarify: you all learned that _humanity_ got Visser One to surrender? That’s the version they taught you?”

The poor guy, completely misunderstanding him, blushed. “I mean, that is, _you_ defeated Visser One, professor. You and your team. The Animorphs. They’re the ones who won the war. I didn’t mean to imply that it was a collective effort.”

Jake was blushing now too, clearly aware that he’d just come off like he was tooting his own horn. “First of all, it was entirely a collective effort. But also, that wasn't what I meant.”

“Oh.” The guy sat back in his seat, clearly deciding that he wasn’t going to risk saying anything else.

“What I meant is this: it wasn’t the Animorphs who beat Visser One. Who outsmarted him. Who left him cornered with no choice but to surrender.” Jake held up a hand to forestall the couple people who had just raised their hands to answer. “It wasn’t the andalites, either. Or the taxxons, or the hork-bajir. Not if we're talking about Visser One specifically."

The hands went down.

We made eye contact and then glanced around the room. Both of us waiting for someone else to come out with another guess.

I raised an eyebrow at Jake, and he grimaced fractionally. It wasn’t that the truth had been concealed for the delicacy of everyone’s sensibilities, the way that it had been with the hork-bajir home world. It was more that humanity was more comfortable with a version of events in which human innovation—or courage and pluck, why not—was enough to bring Visser One down all on its own.

It was like the belief that World War I could have been prevented if someone had taken a time machine and saved Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s life. Simple. Comfortable. Comforting, in the illusory knowledge that we all understood exactly what had happened and why. It gave us the sense we could prevent anything like it from happening in the future. Like a game of telephone, the story of that final battle in the skies over Earth had been stripped of all its details until it was easy to remember, easy to tell, and easy to believe in.

“I didn’t come up with a way to defeat Visser One,” Jake said at last. “A yeerk known as Visser Seventeen did.”

Most people’s response was to start writing that down. A few just sat there frowning in confusion.

But there were a couple recruits who had done their homework. Because first one or two people, and then more and more of them, twisted around.

Soon every single one of them was looking at me.

“And that’s why I have Visser Seventeen’s host here,” Jake said, for the handful of people who were still glancing around in confusion. “The version of the Battle of the Pool Ship you’ve learned in school isn’t wrong, just incomplete. And we need that additional perspective to fill in the gaps about what really caused the collapse of the Yeerk Empire.”

Rather than making everyone continue to crane their heads back to look at me, I walked down to the front of the room.

“Hi,” I said. “I just want to start off by pointing out that Jake here is not giving himself nearly enough credit for winning the war. And that when half the Andalite Navy call him _Prince_ Jake, they’re not just doing it for the way he gets all embarrassed every time someone says that. If he hadn't been one of the can’t-make-a-basketball-team dumb kids that ended up responsible for the planet…” I shrugged elaborately.

“We’d all be dead right now?” the eager guy in the front row suggested. He sounded way too cheerful to be giving that answer.

“Technically that’s a best-case scenario, but sure, let’s go with that,” I said lightly. “Point is none of us would be sitting around talking about how to defeat yeerks, no matter where any of our bodies happened to be. Anyway, Essa four-one-two. Visser Seventeen. Yours not so truly. Tried to overthrow the Yeerk Empire. Might have succeeded if not for some meddling kids, but we'll get back to that. Anyone know why the little slug thought it would be a good idea?”

“You can morph, right?” the woman from the back said. “So, he had a technological edge?”

“At the time I had a whopping four morphs, all from Earth,” I said. “Alloran had…” I glanced at Jake.

“Um, over forty that I’ve seen,” he said. “Most of them more powerful than any living Earth predator.”

“They realized what was going to happen to them once the humans won?”

It was the guy who’d made the ‘courage and pluck’ comment. I officially respected him more now. Like, eight percent more.

Either way I nodded. Gave him a go-ahead wave.

“They figured out that being able to morph meant that they didn’t have to be parasites anymore. That they didn’t have to listen to Visser One.” The guy looked from Jake to me for confirmation and must have liked what he saw, because he kept going. “They wanted something different."

He was right. Well, mostly right.

There was another reason Essa’d rebelled, but that was entirely personal. I’d been called away to Grandpa G’s funeral for four days, and the yeerk’s own species had left him to die. Not just die — starve. He’d been left abandoned by peers and commanders alike. Because it wasn’t _convenient_ to redirect the resources necessary to save him. And killing Visser One would have been Essa 412’s cold, cold revenge. The yeerk had figured that if his empire wasn’t going to be loyal to him, then he had no reason to be loyal to it. 

“You've got it,” I said out loud. “Jake, get the guy one of those star stickers.”

“Somehow I forgot to bring gold star stickers to award to people who got right answers,” Jake said, sounding deeply unamused. “My bad.”

“He’ll get you back later,” I promised the student.

The guy clearly didn’t know what to make of me.

I turned back to the rest of the class. “Visser Seventeen was cut from the same cloth as Visser One, and most other vissers for that matter. Ambitious. Ruthless. A few fries short of a Happy Meal. The yeerks' whole system of rewarding crazy stunts with massive promotions meant that they got a lot of innovative thinking without risking mass disobedience. But it also meant that then you had your whole empire run by the kind of people who went off on harebrained schemes any time the impulse struck.”

At least a few of them were smirking. Oh yeah, they knew what I meant.

“Esplin was practically sane compared to his Visser Two,” I said. “Visser Nine ended up getting executed for feeding so many subordinates to a single taxxon that he also killed the taxxon. The former Visser One, Edriss, deluded herself into thinking she had a ‘happy family’ with some of her favorite slaves. They were all nuts, and the crazy just fed off itself. The reason the center kept holding despite all that is because ‘crazy’ doesn’t mean ‘stupid.’ Most of the time it meant ‘just crazy enough to try eight impossible ideas until one worked.’”

They were all taking notes again. If this was going to be the next crack team that foiled future aliens’ evil schemes, I didn’t have much faith in the long-term survival of the species.

“So. Visser Seventeen was nuts like the rest of them. But he was nuts in a just barely useful direction most of the time. Therefore, not worth executing.”

I sighed. Visser One had come so damn close, too, when he first figured out that Essa 412’d been living down the hall from the Animorphs’ prince for the entire war and not noticed. Our continued survival had been deeply disappointing at the time.

“Anyway.” I glanced around again, not sure what to do with an audience this attentive. “Essa four-twelve was the one who stole the Blade ship. Used it to take the Pool ship hostage, and Visser One with it. He was also the one who snuck the Animorphs onto the Pool ship in the first place to create a diversion for his own hijacking. If none of that had happened, the Animorphs probably would’ve found a way to end the war without him. But it might have gotten even messier in the process.”

A hand went up. This woman was dark-haired, arrestingly beautiful.

“Yeah?” I said.

She lifted her chin, looking from me to Jake and back. “You are saying, then, that a yeerk won the war?”

Kind of. “No. But it wasn’t like there was a single tactical strike.” I shrugged. “Point is, the war ended on a perfect storm of sorts: Visser Seventeen tried to sell out Visser One, the taxxons got sick of being treated like crap and decided to rebel, Visser One himself was stupidly overconfident about defending the Pool ship, the human military was finally getting in on the game, the hork-bajir had mustered a force strong enough to strike back, the Andalite Navy hit a breaking point where they could no longer ignore Earth... And yeah, there were these Animorph kids running around breaking things. It all converged at once on Visser One, and the fact that Arbron and Jake and Essa four-twelve all took advantage of each other’s messes.”

I glanced at Jake. I hadn’t exactly _approved_ of his deal with Essa and Arbron, but no one had asked my opinion at the time. I’d just been a bargaining chip. One whose disgruntlement over being swapped in exchange for a Blade ship and a planet had never actually ended up on the record.

“It worked out,” Jake said, to me and to the class. Probably talking about two different things. “Maybe more in spite of us than because of us, but it mostly worked out.”

Another hand. Jake nodded to the guy.

“It was a coincidence?” The guy sounded alarmed. “You won based on _luck_?”

“Yes,” Jake said, at exactly the same time I said, “No.”

We glanced at each other. “Sort of?” Jake said.

“Are you saying that humanity couldn’t have won the war without the yeerks?” the guy said.

“I’m saying that the yeerks’ technological advantage forced the Animorphs to rely on an utterly untrustworthy insider to bypass the security systems,” I said. “And that the Yeerk Empire’s massive, embarrassing, system-wide communications problems did as much to bring the structure down as any attack from the outside did.”

Jake was nodding along as I spoke.

“That said, you all figured out plenty of ways to find and exploit those weaknesses.” I made a gesture of acknowledgement at Jake. “But the weaknesses were there. The super-strict power structure induced subordinates to lie to sub-vissers, encouraged sub-vissers to stab each other in the back rather than valuing the greater good, allowed vissers to pursue ego-driven pet projects with no one to tell them they were wrong, and all in all created more waste than advancement.”

“Yeah, and all that meant that some other visser deciding to kill Visser One was...” Jake tilted his head in thought. “Pretty much inevitable. In the end, that power structure was its own worst enemy.”

I spun to look at the class as a whole. “Moral of the story: think for yourselves! Question your leaders—” I made a grandiose gesture at Jake. “To the point of obnoxiousness!”

Jake sighed loudly. “Thank you _so much_ for your assistance.”

I grinned at him. “Of course.”

There were more hands in the air.

“Just... talk,” Jake said.

I was pretty sure that idea wasn’t going to sink in anytime soon.

“Is that really all there is?” front-row guy asked. “The yeerks defeated themselves?”

“It’s important not to think of them as a uniform entity,” I said.

“Little bit, yeah,” Jake said over me.

The guy crossed his arms. He looked less certain now. “So if any other invasive species decides to take over the planet, we have no effective defense in place?”

“Yep,” Jake said cheerfully. “Pretty much.”

“That’s really affirming, squirt, exactly what they need to hear,” I said.

I distinctly saw one of the women in the back row mouth _squirt?_ to the guy sitting next to her.

“I will kill you and hide the body,” Jake promised in an undertone.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

"So what could they have done differently?" the eager guy said.

"The yeerks?" I thought it through for a few seconds. "Given up on the boondoggle of the Sharing and started an open war. Or demoted Esplin and put someone less loud and impulsive in charge. Either might have worked. But the goals of keeping things quiet and having their precious andalite-controller in charge on Earth were more or less mutually exclusive."

The guy smiled nervously. "Actually, I meant... What could the humans have done to end the war faster, or with fewer casualties?" he said.

"Oh." I laughed, spreading my hands out in an I've-got-nothing gesture. "No clue. Somebody else come up with a scenario where an army of two hundred fifty thousand gets taken down by an army of six."

There was a long silence. People didn't really look like they were frantically trying to come up with answers. More like they were just digesting that extremely depressing math.

"It wasn't that bad," Jake said quietly. "We had a technological edge."

"Not by that point in the war," I pointed out.

"Okay, but by that point we'd pulled more people in than just the Animorphs," he said.

"Oh, so you were thirty-odd against two-fifty thousand." I rolled my eyes. "That makes all the difference in the world."

Jake lifted his chin, not giving an inch. "We had home court advantage."

"And the yeerks had access to every scrap of knowledge from thousands of human minds they'd already taken over," I said.

Neither of us was paying any attention to anyone else in the room by now. "We had experience," Jake said.

"What, three years' worth? So?" I smiled. "Alloran and Esplin between the two of them had over three _decades'_ worth."

"We were using andalite technology."

"So were they."

“Yeah, fine, the Earth is doomed.”

Jake snapped his mouth shut. Clearly remembering our audience too late to take it back.

"That wasn't actually the point I was making," I said, turning to the room. “And for the record, you don’t believe that either,” I told Jake.

He nodded tightly.

“So...” Front-row guy looked from one of us to the other. “What _would_ you like us to know, then?”

"I'm saying that in nine-hundred ninety-nine scenarios out of a thousand, the yeerks take this planet." I made eye contact with him. "So if Jake's right and other aliens are coming for us, you're signing up to be the most important humans who have ever existed in the history of the species. It means that you don't get to quit, or hesitate, or do anything other than give every second of every day of the rest of your lives toward the cause, until eventually it kills you. Sorry."

There was a long silence. And then the guy stood up, saluted to Jake, and walked out of the room without looking back.

Jake kept his expression carefully neutral, but I could tell he was pleased. Anyone with the common sense to self-select out of morphing had his respect. Plus, the more people who did the math for themselves that they wouldn’t make it, the fewer he had to remove the hard way.

If I had to guess, that guy was going to get a private request for commendation and maybe even promotion if Jake could pull the strings to make it happen.

"The government wants to be prepared," Jake said to the remaining recruits. "For anything. We don't know that there will be another threat on the scale of the yeerks, or larger. We don't know that we'd be facing it alone. But we need to consider every possible scenario. That the yeerks were just the beginning. That the andalites might someday decide to conquer this planet. That there is already another, greater enemy among us right now that is both more powerful and more subtle than the yeerks ever were.”

Oh, great. That was a lovely thought.

Jake let that news sink in for a few seconds. "We need to be ready for the possibility that we have already lost a second Silent War."

I could see him grimace a little as he said the last words. That was what the newspapers called the yeerk-human war most of the time: The Silent War. I guess it was because calling it Galactic War One was a little too pessimistic for most people. But the “silent” war had sounded pretty damn loud to me, from down in the yeerk pool.

Anyone who had been caught by surprise by the war had also never really been affected by it. So I didn't get why the ones from outside got to name it. Got to act like it was some massive inconvenience that came out of nowhere. Got to speak for everyone when they did.

“So,” Jake said, regaining some of his earlier brightness. “Questions?”

I took that as my cue to turn and head for the door. My work here was done.

“What’s the most useful morph you ever acquired?” a guy asked as I walked past.

“Seagull,” Jake said immediately. “Tobias would probably kill me for saying it, but they could fly, swim, blend in anywhere, and get away with anything. They can travel in groups without attracting notice, they don’t have any problematic instincts outside of a fondness for dumpster-diving, and they have few natural predators. If I had to go back and fight the war with just one morph, that would be it.”

I slipped out the back door of the room. He had this all under control.


End file.
